And she does!

He's already belted in. The radio is on - Techno Crystal music, which is something like chiptunes mixed with a church organ and choir, and glances over, waiting for her to buckle up.

She can undertake the obvious action, though it's somewhat obvious that she had to think about what was going on before she actually did.

He starts driving, rolling down the hill and zipping up to speed on the desert roads once clear of Bordertown. It's pretty bumpy. "This old beater isn't as good as a motorcycle or a real offroad truck for the desert, but it's not too far... And I have a few customizations. The suspension, the underbody. Four wheel drive. I'm sure you know unassuming appearances are useful. And I'm not even talking obliquely anymore, though the real subject should wait until we're a bit further from any drones that could read our lips... Not that we ought to be of interest to anybody serious."

"If it's just lipreading we need to worry about, I have some tricks for that."

"There could be something planted on the car."

"...Hmm."

She might well have some tricks for that, too.  "How would they have done that?"

"Taped or magnetized something to the frame, set it to record sound and thinking to pick it up later. I don't exactly have a secure private garage. I don't actually think it's likely either, this is just establishing mutual professional paranoia, really. Who even spies on the Mercy Crew? You can't get blood from a stone or enough money worth actual attention from the kind of people we help. At worst you boost our whole operation and get some twenty or thirty thousand in gear and piss the hell out of several parties who I've arranged to like the status quo."

She nods, the 'mutual professional paranoia' line draws out a thin but sincere smile.  Then she flicks her hand through a complex series of gestures, touches the car, and there is a pulse of something, feeling oddly like they've gone over a bump in the road.

"That ought to be sufficient to dislodge any hypothetical listening devices.  I'm glad you're not expecting that that was truly necessary, though, because I haven't tested it against tape.  I doubt it'd work on string, either, come to think of it.  Unless it was very poor-quality string."

Welcome to her circle of trust, Dr. Anno.  It's a bit of a dangerous place to be.

"Remarkable." He doesn't seem to feel like he's been entered into a circle of trust at all, to be honest. There's any number of ways she could have pulled off that bit of showmanship, such as planting some sort of charge on his car herself, or carrying some exotic high-tier implant.

They're rolling along one of the more intact old roads at a good forty miles an hour, now. "Fifteen minutes to the place I mentioned, by the by."

She's vaguely surprised that he didn't ask how that worked, enough to raise a questioning eyebrow back at him. 

(She isn't taking that 'Remarkable' as a true compliment, either - which she thinks is also his intended reading.  Remarkable is dangerous when you're doing shadow work.)

"Anything less fraught you want to talk about, til we're there?"

"Everything does seem very fraught sometimes. People who can do very surprising things are often trouble magnets. And to clear the stupid you know I know you know games, I am bearing in mind that you could be running some sort of confidence game but it doesn't add up. There's nothing to gain by doing it this particular way. I can't place your - role in the game, as it were. You're not a chump, you're not a thug, and you're not an established player here. You don't know how medical equipment or seatbelts work and have the oddest patches of ignorance, like you know your humint, but not something else obvious to local conditions."

"...You could say...I'm from very far away.

"...The stars are different, here."

And after that - veiled admission - after she conveys the shrouded truth in a murmur that is very careful to not tremble, she continues:

"...I'm curious what the obvious thing I missed is, because obviously it wasn't quite obvious enough."

"Cameras everywhere. Someone noticed you went after a known Anarchist patsy and got into a confrontation with him- But only because their sensor watching an alley entrance caught you heading after him. Even looking different, it's a reasonable leap. They reported it to me and God only knows who else."

She swears.

"Well that sure is..."

"Mm."

"Annoying.  I hadn't figured that anyone would be paying such close attention to that little ...warning... I handed out - to someone who was about to be quite an idiot by undoing all my hard work - though you can hopefully rest assured that I did know cameras existed by then.  I saw a sign on one of the burned-out shops on my way in."

And previously had no idea.

"Another world would neatly explain several things, which is why I don't buy it. I don't- Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence. I don't believe in God, I just use him as a swear, but nor am I militantly atheist if you can produce extraordinary evidence."

"...Hmm.  What sort of things would constitute extraordinary evidence?"

"Telling you about some of them would obviate them, sadly. I'm sure you can think of some things."

"Well.  The 'statistical anomalies' clearly weren't quite enough on their own, but I could heal an injury without touching you?"

"After I make appropriate equipment preparations. I do have an internal biomonitor but more sensors are better. I can design a whole procedure later if you'd be willing to participate."

"Certainly.  I'd like to know what you're doing and how and why you're doing it, when that wouldn't obviate the experiment."

For all that her voice is calm, she seems really interested in this idea!

"Very well. The first experiment would be only myself- We can do that in a few minutes. The second would be a blind study, or whatever imitation of it I can manage, but the key point would be that neither you nor I know what exactly is being tested and on whom, and everything is analyzed by someone else who also doesn't know what's going on ideally, to isolate as many factors and unconscious biases as possible. Academia may be a pointless circle-jerk most of the time but the basic scientific method is still valid."

"-- I was going to say that I would need to see what I'm doing to target my spellwork, but actually, I see no reason why I couldn't define an area through a wall.  Or cast blindfolded."

"Yes, something like that. Hmm... Okay, the turn off is up ahead. Few more minutes after that. Would you like to occupy the rest of the time listening to me ramble about medicine, or just listen to the music?"

"Oh please do ramble, I'm fascinated by the capacity you have to do things for reasons instead of getting lucky with herbs.  Surgery seems like it hasn't gotten much less bloody since I was living in a stone hut, though.  ...You do know that nobody actually did that, right, making all that stone be somewhere that isn't a cave takes effort nobody expends on a hut in the middle of nowhere.  You mostly get stone houses in cities where people have enough resources to throw at laborers, or there's an old watchtower nobody's using.  Well.  A watchtower isn't not a house even during active use, but still.

"...Most of the peasant dwellings I've seen were generally thatch, wood, or mud-brick, really.  You maybe have a stone hearth, but quarries take labor away from the farms, so you can't really have too much of that; you need to reserve it for essential labor like iron mines.  Or mines for copper and tin, I suppose; there wasn't enough iron production to stop using bronze in the everyday.  More limited by the ore, that, but there weren't exactly a lot of smiths who could do the sort of things I can barely touch on and you probably electrified."